[Mailman-Users] @signs in FORMs

[Mark Sapiro]

On 08/09/2018 09:09 AM, Bernie Cosell wrote:
> I'm a bit confused [as always].  On the Member List page, all of the @signs 
> that appear [e.g., in all the email addresses] are HTML encoded:  The 
> member "jojo at newhost.com" ends up in the FORM for the list as
> <INPUT name="jojo%40newhost.com_realname"
>             type="TEXT" value="jojojo" size="22" >
> <INPUT name="user" type="HIDDEN" value="jojo%40newhost.com" >


It's not really relevant to your question, but encoding @ as %40 is
called URL encoding, not HTML encoding. Sometimes, characters,
especially non-ascii but also some ascii) are encoded in HTML as HTML
entities which for @ would be @ or @.


> But I can't get my dumb program to update the member list [e.g., to turn on 
> a 'mod' checkbox].  I'm busy debugging but I'm wondering: when my 
> program submits the form fields, should it use the %40 form, or convert the 
> fields back to @signs?  [At the moment I can't get it to work either way but 
> I'd like to know which is correct].  Thanks!!


It shouldn't matter for ascii characters such as @. See, e.g.
<https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp>.

Except, it is possible that your program url encodes the data it's given
in which case it might turn %40 into %2540, and that won't work.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan